People let their (understandable) hatred of Intel-the-company colour their technical judgement. Itanium was one of the more interesting architectures of its time, it fairly flew on expert-tuned assembly; I still believe we'll see a return to its ideas once the computing world finally moves on from C.
(Netburst is also unfairly maligned if you ask me; contrary to the article, enthusiasts have clocked those P4s up to 12GHz. As far as I know they're still, over a decade later, the fastest CPU for single-threaded sequential integer workloads that has ever been made; certainly the fastest x86-compatible processor for such. They're kind of the equal and opposite failure to the Itanium, ironically enough)
(Netburst is also unfairly maligned if you ask me; contrary to the article, enthusiasts have clocked those P4s up to 12GHz. As far as I know they're still, over a decade later, the fastest CPU for single-threaded sequential integer workloads that has ever been made; certainly the fastest x86-compatible processor for such. They're kind of the equal and opposite failure to the Itanium, ironically enough)